I was very excited to get to the METC conference. I was
looking forward to one session in particular…”Visual Storytelling” that was at
1:00. However, I didn’t make it because I had a sick kid at school. Ugh!!! By
the way, it has spread in our house and it has not been pretty these last few
days L
Once I arrived and picked up my facilitator packets I was ready
to get started. Prior to attending my first session, I walked around at viewed the
booths that were set up. For me, the most interesting was the Mackin Booth.
This couldn’t possibly be because I’m a librarian at heart J
The first session I attended was “Planning & Implementing a BYOD: Panel
Discussion”. The session was hosted by Mariano Marin-Gomez from Lindberg School
District, Jason Rooks, and Tom Swoboda, both from Parkway School District.
There were approximately 35-50 people in the class and most of them were
technicians of their district. There were a few administrators and teachers as
well. I think the main purpose of this session was discussing transitions from
a building centric tech to a student centric tech. They also discussed the “BYOD
(bring your own device)” and how it has encouraged students. I think that just
like every other district the technological access used to be from “somewhere”
to now being “everywhere”. Initially before these districts started the “BYOD”
parents/teachers were worried that it would distract students from their
everyday learning. However, data has shown it to be beneficial in students’
learning. I also learned about the four step foundational concept; (1) Professional
Development, (2) Infrastructure, (3) Educational Purpose, and (4) Community
Involvement. We could not have a sound foundation without these four
components. I do have to say that I was somewhat lost in the mix of some ideas
they were discussing. Because so many others were techs, Tom Swoboda discussed
a lot of infrastructure and wiring. It was confusing for me but I know it made
perfect sense to most who attended. I liked one idea they used in classrooms to
let students know if the technological device could be used that particular
day. They used a stop light. If it was on red when the students entered the
room, devices could not be out or used. If it was on yellow, the students could
use when teacher felt it was necessary. If it was on green, they knew they
could have devices out and ready to use. I enjoyed the session and the
information it provided. I have viewed a few sites they discussed and really
liked them so I thought I would share.
www.polleverwhere.com
– Student surveys
www.socrative.com –
Student Assessments
The second session I attended was also very informative. It
was “Experience the 21st Century Co-Learning & Co-Teaching Classroom
presented by Basiyr Rodney and Roy Tamashiro from Webster University. This was
designed around ISTE NETS creative thinking, collaborative learning, and
authentic (real-world app). Their focus points were to solve, think, and inform
using technology. They also showed a lot of word clouds and how to inquire and
create things together in the classroom. A site we used in the session was
called tinyurl.com/metc21co. It was a neat site that used word clouds to help brainstorm
information. The cool thing about this was that you could then click on one of
the words provided it would bring up pictures or definitions. It has a built in
thesaurus. It also allows you to pull pictures off and use them for topic. From
the information I gathered, this type of information is for brainstorming with
the class and then having them have a variety of topics to choose from. This
would be a great tool to use in the classroom and to keep students involved.
Another tool they discussed was Taxido (another word cloud). One main idea that
I pulled away from this session was that we want to go beyond our regular
teaching approaches but we want to make sure that it’s not too far off from our
curriculum. I really enjoyed this session and received some valuable
information from it was well.
